I have a star named Gremhog in the lovely galaxy. This blog will be dedicated to the stars in my life...the ones known and the ones yet to be discovered.

Thursday, January 26, 2012

who knew

Roshambo was another name for Rock/Paper/Scissors? Robert and I were watching Castle from Monday night and that's where we heard it. That is what I get for being a homebody and no kids. But now I know...and learned more when I looked it up:

Additional weapons

With an odd number of choices, each beats half the weapons and loses
to half the weapons. No even number of weapons can be made balanced,
unless some pairs of weapons result in a draw; there will always be some
weapons superior to others.
An example of an unbalanced four-weapon game adds "dynamite"
as a trump. Dynamite, expressed as the extended index finger or thumb,
always defeats rock, and is defeated by scissors. Using dynamite
generally implies that dynamite burns paper, but some claim that paper
would smother the fuse. The fourth option of dynamite changes each
gesture's odds of winning. For instance, scissors' odds improve from 33%
to 50% while rock's odds decrease from 33% to 25%. Dynamite can be used
to cheat by quickly raising or lowering the thumb on the downstroke
once the opponent's play is recognized. Organized rock-paper-scissors
contests never use dynamite.[9]

Similarly, the French game "pierre, papier, ciseaux, puits" (stone,
paper, scissors, well) is unbalanced; both the rock and scissors fall in
the well and lose to it, while paper covers both rock and well. This
means two "weapons", well and paper, can defeat two moves, while the
last two weapons can only defeat one of the other three choices.

One popular five-weapon expansion, invented by Sam Kass and Karen Bryla,[10] adds "Spock" and "lizard" to the standard three. "Spock" is signified with the Star Trek Vulcan salute,
while "lizard" is shown by forming the hand into a sock-puppet-like
mouth. Spock smashes scissors and vaporizes rock; he is poisoned by
lizard and disproven by paper. Lizard poisons Spock and eats paper; it
is crushed by rock and decapitated by scissors. Adding new gestures has the effect of reducing the odds of a tie, while
increasing the complexity of the game.

Personally, I'm sticking with the original 3..altho I like the idea of dynamite.